How the Metaverse Is Actually Gaming By Design

 NAB

article here

And the nerds shall inherit the Earth. Gaming companies like Roblox and Epic Games (Fortnite) Minecraft (owned by Microsoft) are building the Metaverse in their own image and we are all going to players.

“We have reached the point in which the constraints to simulation fidelity and functionality have relaxed enough that the expertise in gaming can be applied … to the Metaverse,” says Matthew Ball, a venture capital investor and respected commentator on all things Metaverse, in this video.

For that reason, he argues, the leaders of tomorrow are today's gaming companies.

Ball is usually on the money in delivering insight but his vision is blunted here. Perhaps because in this video sermon he is ultimately promoting the consultancy Big Think. Rather than presenting any big ideas he rehashes an idea that we’re all pretty accustomed to – that gaming technology and game-play is front and centre of the experience in the spatial internet.

Game development means basically creating an entire new universe from scratch, so it stands to reason that has a drastic effect on the Metaverse.

Roblox has, on the average day, about 55 million users; Minecraft is about 80% that size; Fortnite has 70 to 80 million estimated monthly users, and even more engagement time [figures quoted by Ball].

His reasoning for why gaming companies are most likely to be masters of the metaverse is two-fold. One is that the ‘super-fidelity’ necessary to deliver an ultra-real experience is now available to mainstream consumer entertainment. Previously, graphic ‘virtual’ reality was only possible for industries like medical and military which has the money to put behind the computing muscle.

Now, Ball reports, the US and British militaries are using Epic’s Unreal Engine for simulation training for active combat.   John Hopkins University is now performing live-patient spinal surgery using game engine-rendering technology. 

The second reason is that gaming development has, over decades, worked through many of the issues confronting those inhabiting, trading in, navigating and socializing within, virtual worlds.

“All of the expertise that is now relevant for the Metaverse has been built and incubated in the gaming sphere. That's not just design principles - obviously they're best at building a virtual world  -- but it's also more nuanced. 

“They have constructed complex marketplace economies, and most importantly, all of the hardest technological problems for the Metaverse - the challenges of networking globally, the constraints of having affordable but super powerful hardware to actually produce a real-time-rendered simulation. The world's best expertise comes from the gaming sector.”

They focus not on game-like objectives - win, kill, shoot, defeat, score - but non-game-like objectives. Instead, the goal is: identify, express, socialize, build, explore.

“That's one of the ways in which many of us have belief that this is a scalable experience, because it meets a human want, and it demonstrably brings many people together.”

But as one social media users comments to Ball’s video, gaming and gamers should not be left to uncritical scrutiny.

“The big problem is that the gaming industry, while highly creative, has also fallen into a lot of dark patterns which manipulate the gamer,” posts a user called hekette. “These patterns need to be reduced or eliminated or we're likely to end up with a depressing dystopic future. They will be used for more than just making money.”